Site Home > Multiple fields & archaeological practice > “Instrumental mixtures”: a soc...
Key Pages
Christopher Witmore |Historical treatments of the discipline have tended to revolve around either the great figures of the discipline or around shifts in paradigmatic thought (Daniel 1981, Trigger 1989). As Colin Renfrew and Paul Bahn contend:
the history of archaeology is… in the first instance a history of ideas, of theory, of ways of looking at the past. Next it is a history of developing research methods, employing those ideas and investigating those questions. And only thirdly is it a history of actual discoveries (2000, 19; emphasis original).
But to whom do we owe the credit? Petrie or Pitt-Rivers? Wheeler or Kidder? Barker or Hodder? Yes, all of these archaeologists, but this would also provide a very incomplete and asymmetrical picture because so many ‘nonhumans’ are mixed into our practices. In continuing to undermine the myth of the ‘great figure’—the lone, freestanding individual—who interacts with the material world out there, all of the grand figures within archaeology’s on-going disciplinary history were actually humans who mobilized ‘allies’ most effectively to a particular cause. Often these allies took the form of institutions, instruments and inscriptions with which transactions occurred in such a way to effect shifts in archaeological practice which I call acts of delegation after Bruno Latour (1994 and 1999).
In order to better understand the tangible presence of the past which we routinely confront in contemporary archaeological practice and which links us intimately with other transactions between humans and things that occurred at earlier times and at more distant places, I argue that we have to retrace the genealogies of practice by collapsing the sociotechnical. In other words, we need to mix the instruments, materials, and media into our collective, sociotechnical history—humans and things held in symmetry. Therefore, in approaching these acts of delegation where new instrumentalities and media affect shifts in our engagements with the material past, I trace some important threads of a sociotechnical genealogy of archaeological practice in the context of Greece and the Aegean.
This genealogy is not necessarily historical, that is, in the traditional linear sense we are accustomed to in the histories of the discipline. Nor is it limited to the social. Rather, I argue it to be profoundly archaeological. In a way, this is what we do when we engage in what is classically understood as ‘the search for origins.’ And yet at the same time through genealogy we avoid that ‘chimera’ (Foucault 1984, 80). We deal in an act of archaeological genealogy by connecting, by temporally folding, both contemporary and past relationships with certain things into these points of delegation, these constituting moments, after which the character of subsequent engagements with the material world were transformed.
More specifically, the notion of delegation refers to the moment when one entity comes into contact with another in such a way as to detour and redirect the path of relation to the world which would have been followed by that entity in absence of any contact (refer to Latour 1999, 185-190). Acts of delegation change the directions of our goals, research, understandings, practices, etc. in relation to the world in which we are entangled. They are the key shifts of historical genealogy born out of a collective encompassing human beings, other companion species, and the material world. Delegation ‘allows us to mobilize in an interaction movements which have been executed earlier, farther away, and by other actants, as though they are still present and available to us now’ (Latour 1994, 792). I argue that two of the key acts of delegation in the case of classical archaeology occurred in the context of survey practice in military geography during the early 19th century.
One contributing factor was associated with a new experimentation among military geographers in the late 18th, early 19th centuries. As Anne Godlewska has put it, ‘if something could be represented with precision, detail, or accuracy, it clearly had the value of truth’ (1995, 9). At the turn of the 19th century there was ever more need for mobilizing places trough a more accurate modes of witnessing. But precisely how to attain the most accurate mode of description was another matter (Godlewska, 1995, 11). The exact combination of plan, map, diagram, and so on was still up in the air. There was a need for a rigorous and precise means of witnessing landscape. There was a need for template to standardization. To this end, I focus specifically on the figure of William Martin Leake (1777-1860) and the French Expédition Scientifique de Morée of 1829-1831.
In the case of Leake, I argue that as a military geographer he was part of a unique assemblage of allies that encompassed not only military institutions, discipline, and knowledge, but also survey instruments, aristocratic social groups, and media (text, plans, maps, illustrations, etc.). In place of a singular ‘field’ denoting the Greek countryside, these allies, I contend, form recursive links to other entities and locales and therefore constitute multiple fields. These multiple fields set Leake apart from his contemporaries and oriented his modes of engagement, not only as a definitive base for topographical fieldwork in Greece, but also as a standard in the scholarly documentation of landscape. From a genealogical perspective, the work of Leake is just as important and intimate to contemporary landscape practice in Greece as much of what transpired in the intervening two centuries. This is because it is with Leake that a unique combination, a collective, of survey instruments—theodolite, sextant, pocket watch, tape, notebook, etc.—comes together in the antiquarian engagements with the Greek countryside. And, what is more, through a number of intermediate steps, Leake’s engagement with the Greek countryside is transformed into distinctive combination of maps, plans, diagrams, and text. Leake’s act of technical mediation creates a template of standardization to be reiterated by subsequent topographers and archaeologists. Leake and the instruments and the publications change practice and help bring about the professionalization of archaeology in Greece.
In my second example of the French Expédition Scientifique de Morée, I focus less on the innovations in survey instrumentalities and practice that they brought to the field than on the actual production of the first accurate ‘scientifically derived’ map of the Morea. The French cartographers, with theodolites, tapes, compasses, chronometers, trigonometry, and so on, shifted a great deal of ambulatory knowledge constitution on the ground to a two-dimensional, combinable and standardized transformation of the surrounding landscape that is now part of the sociotechnical collective (scholar-with-a-map) that comes to study the Peloponnesus (Puillon Boblaye, 1836). The flat projection of an absent region printed in Paris can return to facilitate a different mode of engagement with a place in the Peloponnesus. Indeed, it is this flat, two-dimensional, paper product of the French labors which forms the groundwork for the Greek ordinance map of the Peloponnesus (Lolling 1889, cxvi). The irony is that although it is the French map that becomes the key for further engagement with the Peloponnesus, it was Leake’s practice and his combination of media that form the benchmark for further scholarly work in the Peloponnesus.
Return to Constituting the Field
Forward to William Martin Leake
Multiple fields and archaeological practice Home